Pakistan Pakistan Defence industry News and Discussions

The vehicle is the Defence Industrial Production and Regulatory Authority, created by an ordinance in June. DIPRA absorbs the Ministry of Defence Production and places the entire defence industry, state factories and private firms alike, under a single regulator. The aim is to spur indigenisation, pull private firms into a space hitherto monopolised by the state, and to turn a cost centre into an exporting industry. At a recent seminar on the subject, defence officials engaged the private sector with unprecedented openness. Private is equal to public, they said. Come and register, and you sit at the same table.

In recent years, Pakistan’s private sector has shown a capacity to design original solutions, especially in the domain of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). In fact, at least one such company is working on the sensor-to-effector networking and automation layer that programmes like Heavy Industries Taxila’s (HIT) P-905 counter-drone system depend on. Likewise, at least one company is developing its own interceptor drone stack, i.e., from both automated lightweight and heavyweight effectors to a network-enabled system integrating sensors and providing additional automation elements in the process. Gradient Aerospace, which revealed its ‘Atlas’ perception stack alongside the Swift and Shark interceptors at Indus RAS Expo 2026, is one example. Overall, there has been a notable increase in the number of private companies entering the small-factor UAS market.

Fatman17 said:

DIPRA’s fine print

The aim is to pull private firms into the defence space.

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The vehicle is the Defence Industrial Production and Regulatory Authority, created by an ordinance in June. DIPRA absorbs the Ministry of Defence Production and places the entire defence industry, state factories and private firms alike, under a single regulator. The aim is to spur indigenisation, pull private firms into a space hitherto monopolised by the state, and to turn a cost centre into an exporting industry. At a recent seminar on the subject, defence officials engaged the private sector with unprecedented openness. Private is equal to public, they said. Come and register, and you sit at the same table.

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Local news reports citing officials who attended the seminar also added that the DIPRA will help generate “closer cooperation between government institutions and private industry” and that increased engagement will also lead to a “competitive and self-reliant defence industrial base.”

On face value, DIPRA aims to bring Pakistan’s fragmented regulations and controls on defence production – currently spread across different ministries – under one roof.

Among the items POF put on display was an assault rifle that it had not shown publicly before. Quwa noted at the time that the CDF’s review spanned POF projects ranging “from a new gas-operated assault rifle to new quadcopter-compatible drop munitions.”

The likeliest identity of that rifle is the “Gas Op Rifle” listed in the Ministry of Defence Production (MoDP) Yearbook 2022-2024. Under POF’s “New Initiatives,” the Yearbook places the Gas Op Rifle and a “CW-56 Rifle” under development, both with 2027 target dates, while listing a “BW-20 Rifle” and a “CW-39 Rifle” under trials with 2025 dates.


Therefore, the new rifle is one of at least four in-house POF designs currently in the pipeline. It follows the BW20 and BW21, which POF revealed in December 2021, and the PK18 and PK21 before them.

Basically, the Army’s desired ‘reach capacity’ likely calls for munitions with ranges of 2,000-3,000 km, with low-cost, piston-powered one-way-attack (OWA) drones being a key component. Thus, both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) – e.g., HIT and POF – and private sector-led partnerships (e.g., Fire Point) are actively competing for an apparent bid. If the goal is to emulate Russia, Ukraine, and Iran in their scale-heavy and mass-salvo strategies, then one can expect the Army seeking large numbers of these long-range OWAs to build a large stockpile and wartime production capacity for replenishment.


So, in this context, domestic production via technology transfers and indigenization is expected. However, it will be worth seeing which entities take on the production work, specifically whether they are new private sector entrants or established SOEs. On paper at least, the recently formed Defence Industrial Production and Regulatory Authority (DIPRA) promises pathways for the private sector to pursue this opportunity (i.e., a requirement that could span tens of thousands of units, if not more). So, the private Pakistani company speaking to Fire Point is looking to co-market and manufacture the FP-1 for this requirement.